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Friday, 27 January 2017

Marx, Lenin and Anarchism: Revolution in Fitzrovia

Footprints of London - Revolutionary London

London was the destination for communists and anarchists to
meet and argue over the form that the coming revolution would take.
German anarchists had lived in London since 1848 and came to police
attention after assassination attempts on the Tsar of Russia. Lenin knew
London well, and the final split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
took place here in November 1903, with tragic consequences for the
Russian Revolution in 1917. The communists had fled police spies in
Brussels to meet in Charlotte St in the guise of an anglers club.

Successive waves of exiles from France, Germany and Russia made
a home in Fitzrovia, close to the British Museum where Marx and Lenin
studied, yet in an area where foreigners ran the bookstores and shops.
On this walk we will find the streets where the leading Communard Louise
Michel lived and established a pioneering Fitrovia school, and revisit
the site of the Autonomie anarchist club, linked by police to the
Greenwich bomb of 1894 which inspired Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.